Today's randomness...

I'm sitting at my table overlooking my balcony and the street down below, waiting for snow to start. It's in the forecast today, but I'm still skeptical, considering the decided lack of winter weather we've experienced this year. So far, the temperature is hovering around 39, which means that all we're getting is really cold rain... I MUCH prefer snow to cold rain -- for some reason, 40 degrees and rainy feels about a hundred times more cold and miserable than 30 degrees and snowy.

I just watched a woman with a stroller standing on the corner waiting for the light to change so she could cross the street. She had the stroller halfway off the sidewalk and hanging in the intersection. Hmmm... seems like that's putting an awful lot of faith in the strangers driving their two-ton vehicles around your baby. Maybe I'm just super cautious and totally distrustful, but I don't think I'd let a stroller get anywhere near a street until I was certain everything around me had stopped moving... then again, I AM pretty paranoid...

Rick is returning from a ten-day trip to San Francisco today, where he attended a "boot camp" for his new job. I was trying to think of the last time I'd spent ten days alone, and honestly, I'm not sure I've EVER spent ten days alone. But I definitely don't have a problem with it... I could probably move to Nepal and take up residence in a monastery, where I would take a vow a silence and solitude and hang out with lots of cats. Which is pretty much what I've been doing for the last ten days... minus the Nepal part, of course.

When I turned my TV on this morning, I accidentally hit the channel button, which switched the channel over to Spanish-language Telemundo. A normal person would've immediately looked for something else, but I actually KEPT it on Telemundo for a good half hour and watched some kind of weird, dramatic soap opera. And I don't speak Spanish. But I DO find foreign languages fascinating to listen to, so I'll actually sit and listen with rapt attention to languages I don't understand, completely convinced that if I listen long enough, something will start to make sense. (This is a fact that drives Rick insane, especially if we're in a hotel and I find the Japanese game show channels. I watch as long as I can, until Rick, usually sitting at his computer, begins pleading, "change it, change it, CHANGE IT." It's sort of hilarious... :))

For the first time since we moved to Chicago, I actually have all THREE of my living room lamps arranged, plugged in, and ready to light the room. When we first moved up here, we could only find two of the lamps -- our movers really strangely configured our stuff when they packed it all up, so although two of the lamps were logically found in "living room" boxes, one of them was nowhere to be found. We eventually found it over at our storage facility, when we were rummaging through random boxes -- I can't remember where we finally found it, but I think it was in a "garage" or "workout room" box. And then when we moved into this place, I couldn't find a good place for all three lamps, so one of them has just been sitting idle on my desk. But now that we've had the adventure of acquiring our new TV and set it up in a new space in the living room, some area has been freed up for lamps. And it makes me weirdly happy to see all three of them burning brightly at the same time...

And now I'm off to find something for lunch and to wait for snow... I shall remain skeptical until I see it...